U.S. vs. The World: Paid Parental Leave

When Australia passed a parental leave law in 2010, it left the U.S. as the only industrialized nation not to mandate paid leave for mothers of newborns. Most of the rest of the world has paid maternity leave policies, too; Lesotho, Swaziland and Papua New Guinea are the only other countries that do not. Many countries give new fathers paid time off as well or allow parents to share paid leave.

Will the U.S. catch up with the rest of the world during President Obama’s second term? Advocates are working to get a national law passed while some states are expanding family leave policies, the Atlantic reports. See a new White House petition here. In the meantime, certain companies understand that keeping new parents happy makes more sense than replacing them, which generally costs somewhere between 50 and 200 percent of a worker’s salary. When Google lengthened its maternity leave from three months to five and made it fully paid, new-mom attrition fell by half.